WordPress attacked by DDoS Attack

WordPress, one of the web’s largest blog hosting sites, struggled to keep functioning Yesterday through massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

WordPress said this is the largest and most sustained attack they have seen in their six year history. This attack effects hit all three data centers run by Automattic, that owns WordPress.

WordPress hosts more than 18 million sites and does a weekly average of around 600 million page views. The company notified to its paying subscribers about the attack on yesterday through their newsletter. In this email alert they said “”We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult, and The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.”

But by the afternoon, the effects had subsided, and WordPress’ status site reported that operations were running normally.

DDoS attacks are unsophisticated but extremely hard for websites to defend against. The attacker directs a giant traffic surge to its target, overwhelming the site’s servers and making it hard for legitimate users to access the site.

Last year, Mastercard.com and Visa.com are struggled with similar attacks.